“I feel I stand in a desert with my hands outstretched, and you are raining down upon me.”
― The Price of Salt
Illustration by Jean L. Huens for the Saturday Evening Post. Done for the short story “The Snails,” by Patricia Highsmith.
A long time ago – in 2012 I wrote a blog entry about a short story I remembered reading when I was a child.
The short story had scared the crap out of me when I first read it in 1967 (I would have been ten years old) in The Saturday Evening Post and it had never left my mind. In 2012 I did some web searching, found the story, and in a trip to the library found and read a couple of different versions of it.
Over the years since many people have hit that blog post searching for information on the story. It seems I wasn’t the only child frightened by this story of giant man eating snails.
The other day I finally found an online version of the story – someone has uploaded a PDF of the the version from Patricia Highsmith’s collection The Snail Watcher and Other Stories.
You can find the PDF here:
The Quest for “Blank Claveringi”
(Sorry, the PDF has been removed and the site now links to questionable material. If I find another copy, I’ll link it)
Andrew left a comment-
It’s one of the stories in “The Snail Watchers and other stories” and it’s available to borrow for 1 hour at archive.org – https://archive.org/details/snailwatcherothe0000high.
You have to sign up – but the Internet Archive is cool anyway – so now you can go read it. I’ve checked that book out, there are some other weird, worthy stories in it too. Thanks Andrew!
It’s a cool story – go read it.
Back in 2012, I wrote a bit of… I guess it would be fan fiction – a sequel to The Quest for “Blank Claveringi” – You can read that here:
I have wanted to write another sequel – a monster story about the National Guard fighting giant snails – sort of a Godzilla-type thing – The Attack of the “Blank Claveringi” – maybe I’ll write that over the weekend or sometime.
So little time.
Bill Chance 
I clicked on the link to the pdf for The Quest for Blank Claveringi. However, the webpage is blank. I’d love to read the story.
Yeah, sorry. The person that had the PDF up has taken it down. I’m trying to find another link, If I can locate one, I’ll change the link on the page.
It’s one of the stories in “The Snail Watchers and other stories” and it’s available to borrow for 1 hour at archive.org – https://archive.org/details/snailwatcherothe0000high.
Thanks! I’ll check it out.